Erice

Seven hundred and fifty metres above Trapani, often inside a cloud, Erice is a perfect triangle of cyclopean walls and cobbled lanes where the ancient Mediterranean worshipped the goddess of love: Venus Erycina, the first Roman deity modelled on the Greeks' Aphrodite, whose sanctuary stood where the Norman castle now climbs above the Balio gardens. On clear days you can see the Egadi islands and, they say, even Cape Bon. The walls are Elymian and Punic, and in the first Punic war it was Hamilcar Barca who fortified the mountain, holding the defence of Lilybaeum from here and from Trapani.

The most brazen piece of its history, though, is a forgery. The men up here produced for centuries a document attributed to Frederick II, and on the strength of that paper they held a territory of forty thousand hectares reaching as far as San Vito Lo Capo and Castellammare del Golfo; only between 1948 and 1955 did four parts break away and become municipalities of their own, namely Valderice, Custonaci, San Vito Lo Capo and Buseto Palizzolo. Today the town has two rituals: the warm cream-filled genovesi from Maria Grammatico's pastry shop, who learned the craft in a convent, and the physicists from all over the world who since 1963 have climbed up to the Ettore Majorana centre, founded by Antonino Zichichi. In spring a hill climb is also raced on the hairpins: science, myth and engines in the same fine mist.